


all this talking pulls my teeth

by satellites (orphan_account)



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Baseball, Developing Friendships, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 14:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"That's it," Joan says, setting down her drained mug. "We're playing baseball."<br/>"Absurd," Sherlock ripostes immediately, but she's already hoisting him gently up by the elbow. "Preposterous, Watson. I'll have none of it."</p>
            </blockquote>





	all this talking pulls my teeth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kittu9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/gifts).



> Okay Vern, you caught me, I've only seen the first three episodes of this show. But I wanted to offer you something for your birthday that isn't Young Justice. I hope you have a wonderful day; you deserve it!  
> Also, I remembered you saying you loved Passion Pit – the title comes from "To Kingdom Come."

If there’s one thing that Joan Watson has gathered from three months of living with Sherlock Holmes, it’s that he is prone to impenetrable sullenness spells. There have been no new cases for him to twiddle his fingers through, no gruesome crimes for him to unravel at their scarlet seams. He is bored, and as such, he is quiet, and he hasn’t changed his shirt in three days, though that could be owing to the fact that he keeps irregular hours of not wearing one at all.  
  
“This is agonizing,” he mutters to her on Thursday morning, barely audible, his eyes fixated hazily on the opposite wall as he sits cross-legged on the floor in the den. “How can you stand this?”  
  
“I generally try to fill in the blanks with something called ‘productivity,’” Joan replies, pulling her sweater more tightly at her waist and setting the tea set down on the table. “You oughta try it sometime.”  
  
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, no,” Holmes groans, falling onto his back with a thud, now spread-eagled and lamenting. “I need a _puzzle_ , Watson; I need _blood_.”  
  
“That’s not a very healthy way of saying it,” Joan says dryly, pouring the same two mugs of tea that she does each day. “Drink some tea, will you? You look like hell.”  
  
“Perhaps I am,” Holmes mumbles, suddenly at her shoulder. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of jumping. He sniffs ostensibly at the air over the teapot. “We do seem to have an affinity. What on earth is this?”  
  
“Hibiscus.” Joan passes him a mug with insistence. “Good for your blood pressure. Drink up.”  
  
Holmes pulls a face at it but accepts it anyway before slipping into the den again, his sweatpants hanging at his hips. He sets the tea down on top of the television and returns to the floor, ignoring it completely.  
  
“Worth a shot,” Joan says to herself, clutching her own ceramic with care and comfort. The ridges on the mug fit the shapes of her fingers and sear them, and she holds the drink at her chin, breathing in the steam. “So what do you plan on doing today, now that you’ve loafed around for a good seventy-two hours?”  
  
“I plan on murdering someone myself if it’s not done for me soon,” Holmes retorts. “I’m kidding, of course, Watson; don’t take that seriously.”  
  
“Sometimes I worry.” Joan sighs, taking a swig of the tea. Its tart flavor pricks at her tongue and wakes her. “Really, though – I’m going to have to insist that you do something with yourself today; you’ve been sulking around for the past—”  
  
“Watson, I don’t sulk; I _introspect_ ,” Holmes interjects, staring sharply up at her, unshaven and weary but quite bright-eyed. “Don’t apply such juvenile words to my process. Are you trying to patronize me?”  
  
“That’s it,” Joan declares, setting down her now-drained mug. “We’re playing baseball.”  
  
“Absurd,” Holmes ripostes immediately, but she’s already hoisting him up off the floor by the elbow. “Preposterous, Watson. I’ll have none of it.”  
  
“I actually suspect you’ll have quite a lot of it,” Joan replies, grinning delightedly at him. “Lighten up, Sherlock. It’ll give you some air, some exercise. You need them both.”  
  
“I’m fine,” he insists, digging his heels petulantly into the floor. “Release me at once or I’ll have you sacked.”  
  
“I’d love to see you pull _that_ off,” Joan says as she steers him up the stairs. “Now for god’s sake, go get yourself dressed. We’ll leave in twenty.”  
  
“Good lord,” Holmes mutters to the ceiling, but Joan smirks to herself as he slips out of her grasp and shuffles up the stairs anyway, scratching at the back of his head. “You’re going to make a madman out of me by forcing me to participate in such _idiotic_ —”  
  
“Twenty,” Joan reiterates, venturing off to the hall closet to dig up her cap.  
  
Holmes sighs his assent and vanishes and the cars roll by outside in sunny city murmurs.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Isn’t it a bit silly to only play this with two people?” Holmes shouts to her, sounding pained.  
  
Joan can’t help but be at least a little amused by the sight of him, slouched over and still unkempt, scowling at her from under the bill of one of her spare baseball caps, clad in the only pair of jeans she thinks he owns and a white t-shirt that would look considerably better as a rag. Central Park is as plentifully milling as ever, but the sun is golden and clear and the grass is verdant.  
  
“I guess,” Joan admits, dropping her cherished baseball into the worn leather of her old mitt from college. She tosses her ponytail back over her shoulder and shifts her toes in the dirt. “Let’s just play a bit of catch.”  
  
“Catch? Watson, _please_ ,” Holmes moans, loudly enough to draw a decent amount of attention from other parkgoers. “I’m metaphorically on my knees. Not really, of course; that would be a laughable surrender of dignity.”  
  
“Just catch,” Joan orders, before tugging her arm back and tossing the baseball in an arc towards him.  
  
He dances peculiarly around it and sticks his hand out to catch it, but moves his entire body aside, wincing. Naturally, it bounces at his mitt and drops to the ground.  
  
“What was that?” Joan demands, unable to keep the amusement out of her voice.  
  
“I may be hardened by years of complex investigations, but even I’m sane enough to not enjoy having things fly toward my face,” Holmes snaps. “It’s a survival instinct; look it up.”  
  
“I will,” she assures him. “But first you have to throw it back to me.”  
  
Holmes huffs and mutters indistinctly, most likely a bunch of churlish nonsense, but he hunkers down and picks the baseball up, turning it over in his fingers and frowning at it with calculation. After a moment, he steps back and raises his arm and chucks it at her, and the sound of it hitting the inside of her glove is a familiar one, one that’s coated in traces of summer and growing limbs. She hides the nostalgic smile somewhere in her chest, holding it there in her heart’s fingers, and pitches the ball to him again.  
  
This time he catches it, though it’s a miracle he does, really, as he stumbles back from the ball and nearly bats it away on principle, but it slaps into the leather and he smiles triumphantly, holding all of the worrisomely manic delight that he does when he’s figured out something incredibly clever.  
  
“You doubted me,” he says with confidence, flinging the ball back.  
  
Joan catches it and lifts it into her other hand with age-old smoothness, tossing it over again with a flick of her wrist.  
  
“Oh, never,” she assures him wryly.  
  
This is an absolute lie, for she has spent a great deal of time doubting Sherlock Holmes, this frightfully lonely man who tangles himself in the labyrinths of his own intellect, who forgets to eat for days because his blood dictates to him that he must follow every twine to the end of the maze. She has doubted the truth of his deepest, darkest secrets, for she is a natural skeptic, and she knows that it is her duty to question the integrity of her clients, and she knows that Sherlock Holmes builds up walls around himself until his fingers bleed from exertion, and she knows the empty beats that rest behind his eyes when he realizes something he cannot repair just by picking it apart.  
  
She knows his blindness and his fallacies but she also knows his candor, and she has seen it, and she has seen the pride that swells in his every pore when he solves a problem. She has found him asleep on the hardwood floor at seven in the morning and she has glimpsed him in his moments of frightening normalcy, and she has doubted them all.  
  
But she does not doubt the sun today, the way it bounces at the edges of his eyes when he catches the baseball and it makes the dust from his glove puff into the air around him like fog.  
  
She rears her arm back and flings the ball as far as she can, and she watches Holmes sprint after it, shouting at passerby to move, and she smiles, privately, with her head bowed, because she has realized that Holmes’s greatest passion does not lie in the things he knows he can do well – it lies in the things he must always prove to himself that he can do.  
  
“Watson,” he asks her as they walk back to the car many hours later, as the sun sinks down over the Hudson River, red and restless. “Do you fancy a hot dog?”  
  
“Sure,” Joan replies.  
  
“I loathe them,” Holmes says frankly.  
  
“Then why did you ask?” Joan sighs, exasperated, her hair sticking briefly to the smear of dirt at her cheek.  
  
“Because I’m going to buy you one,” he tells her, raising his eyebrows as though it’s obvious. “I can indulge in the things I despise for the benefit of other people. It’s not difficult.”  
  
Joan studies him, her eyebrows twitching toward each other. He pretends, with incredible skill, not to notice.      

 

 

* * *

 

A twelve-year-old Joan Watson, scabbed at the joints, had told her father that she wanted to be a baseball player, to pitch the stitches from the mound and breathe in the sting of the summer dust. She had watched the clouds and imagined chasing them. The stars would look like a field she could sprint in, like she could hit a home run and it would rocket up amongst them and stay there and glitter like light from a candle.

At the same time, in Islington, a ten-year-old Sherlock Holmes had read a book about sea monsters and had told himself that they were not real. His brother Mycroft had handed him a copy of _Crime and Punishment_ and he had not left their father's old armchair for the rest of the day, wondering if, perhaps, his prolonged presence would erase the intangible stench of their father there, distant and cold in the light from the gray sky outside. 

Joan's freckles had come from the green fields, and the lines at Sherlock's eyes had come from squinting in the bookish musk, his woolen socked feet tucked beneath him. 


End file.
